Life as head coach? For Trestman, all's well with Als in CFL

Of all the coaches I covered in the NFL, the one assistant I wasn't sure would find what he was looking for was Marc Trestman.

'I'm excited and having fun with it,' Marc Trestman says of his CFL job. (Getty Images)

Maybe you remember him. You should. Trestman was the offensive coordinator in Oakland in 2002 when the Raiders went to the Super Bowl and Rich Gannon was the league MVP.

At the time, Trestman hoped to parlay his success -- and the success of the Raiders -- into a head coaching job, but it never happened.

So he wound up on the cutting room floor last year after losing his job as offensive coordinator at North Carolina State -- the first time in the past 18 years he was out of football.

That's not how you find head coaching jobs, but it's how Trestman found his. He's now the head coach of the Montreal Alouettes, and c'est si bon.

It's the perfect job for Trestman.

First of all, it allows him to do what he always wanted, which is to run a football team. Second, the Alouettes let him spend the offseason with his family in Raleigh, N.C., where his girls attend high school. Third, CFL rules play to someone with Trestman's expertise in the passing game. Fourth, it's Montreal, and, hey, what's not to like?

"I'm excited and having fun with it," said Trestman, hired after GM Jim Popp asked him to interview for the job. "I'm really grateful, and I'm going to do the best I can."

Here's hoping he does because Trestman was one of the smartest, most thoughtful and most gracious coaches I met covering this league. He was one of the most successful, too, with his work with the 2002 Raiders the crowning achievement.

When Oakland played the Steelers the second game that season, Trestman dialed up 65 passes -- including 18 in the first 19 snaps -- and the Raiders cruised to a 30-17 victory. Later, the Raiders ran 60 times in a 24-0 defeat of Kansas City, becoming the first team in NFL history to win running and passing 60 times each in the same year.

Gannon wound up with 4,689 passing yards and 26 TDs, and the Raiders produced a league-high 450 points. By comparison, Oakland's quarterbacks had 24 touchdown passes, and the team 451 points the last two years.

"The best time of my whole career," Trestman said of his Oakland experience.

Until now, that is. Because now he has his first head coaching job, albeit in a league where the rules, the field, the rosters, the budgets are -- pardon the expression -- foreign to anything Trestman experienced in the NFL.